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Mexican America

History

Mexican America

The ancestors of Mexican Americans are many—railroad workers from Jalisco, Afro-Mexican founders of Los Angeles, Hispanos from Northern New Mexico, part-German Tejanos, indigenous Californians, and Spanish settlers from the Canary Islands, to name just a few. The objects displayed here tell stories about the people whose lives were shaped by their encounters and experiences within Mexican America. Their stories show the western face of the American experience of race, economics, religion, and government. They illustrate a struggle over history, nation, and the notion of "us."

Pre-Hispanic FoundationsOver time and space, the land that today is called Mexico has been many nations, great and small. Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Zuni, Yaqui—their names, like their languages, are many, and their cultural achievements and sensibilities diverse. From California to Guatemala, Mexico is a place of cultural and technological intersections. The ideas, designs, agriculture, and languages of its distinct indigenous peoples did not disappear with the imposition of new boundaries, religions, and institutions, either by Spain, the United States, or modern Mexico’s central government. The objects on view below, like the Aztec hoe money, the print of Hernán Cortés, and Mexican codices, tell their stories. The religious beliefs, political vision, language, and art of Mexican Americans, as well as their histories of discrimination and struggle, are rooted in diverse and mixed indigenous identities. The objects grouped together here, many of which were produced by people north of today’s U.S.-Mexico border and centuries after the Spanish colonial period, reflect the continuity and adaptation of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic foundations.

Christianization, Conquest, and CoexistenceThree factors were decisive in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Without warriors from neighboring Tlaxcala and other anti-Aztec allies, and the aid of an indigenous interpreter known as La Malinche, Hernán Cortés and his small Spanish army could not have laid siege to and destroyed the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, in 1521. The city was not prepared to resist the siege following a smallpox epidemic the year before. A disease introduced to the Americas by Europeans and Africans, it had decimated the population of the Aztec heartland in the previous year, and was spreading throughout Mesoamerica. The Spanish colonial social order imposed Catholicism and feudal partitions of lands. Where they did not encounter resistance, the Spanish would insert themselves at the top of pre-existing social hierarchies. Often, pre-Hispanic forms of labor organization, trade, and government were left intact or modified to suit colonial economic interests. But this process of Christianization, conquest, and even coexistence in the lands to the north and south of the Central Valley of Mexico, was centuries in the making.

American history in the broadest sense was created during these often violent encounters between Europeans, Native Americans, Africans, and their mixed descendants. Specifically, the history of the United States does not begin only in Jamestown or Plymouth but also in the Pueblo Nations and the Spanish and Mexican settlement of Texas, the Southwest, and California. The bilingual Spanish-Náhautl catechism, the hide painting, and the doll of La Llorona are just a few of the objects on view below that illustrate the dramatic cultural encounters that unfolded in what is today Mexico and the American West.

Mexico and the American West in the 19th CenturyEmblems of the American West like cowboys, rodeos, ranches, and missions (remember the Alamo?), have their origins in the histories of exchange and conflict between the Spanish, Mexican, and indigenous communities who lived in the territory between California and Texas. This centuries-long process reassembled their traditions and made a particular impact on land management.

In the early 1800s, American settlers were moving westward into Mexican territory. Mexico, the crown jewel among Spain’s colonies, and the staging post for its trade with Asia, became a sovereign nation in 1821 and controlled the greater western portion of what is today the United States. The American settlers encountered and then took-over the local social hierarchies that determined access to resources like land, water, trade, and labor. In addition to the Tejanos (who numbered about 5,000 at the time of Texan Independence), about 80,000 Mexican citizens were absorbed by the United States as a consequence of U.S. territorial gains in the Mexican-American War in 1848.

While the stories of this first generation of Mexican Americans are extremely diverse, dispossession from land is a recurrent theme. At the end of the century, new populations of Mexicans crossed the border, many seeking work on the railroads newly connecting the two countries. Replacing their Chinese and Japanese predecessors, Mexicans laborers, and their Mexican-American descendents, became the prescribed economic solution to the labor shortage in the booming economies of the new American West. For perspectives on the 19th century, take special note of the objects on view below like the 1879 Almanac, the spur, and the prints titled "Mexican Guerrilleros" and "The Storming of Chapultepec."

Mexican-Americans in the 20th centuryThe movements to reclaim the citizenship, land, labor, and educational rights of old and new generations of Mexican-Americans began in the small farming towns of South Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and in industrial cities like El Paso, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The principles and symbols of Mexican American mobilization and social activism are rooted in both ancient and modern history. The images and language of the Mexican Revolution (1910 1920) and the African American civil rights movement cross-pollinated with Aztec migration stories, the legacy of Spanish colonization, and the experiences of WWII veterans. By the close of the 20th century, the ideas articulated by Mexican American social movements had crossed over into common understandings of race, immigration, national borders, and bilingualism.

Similar notions of ethnicity and culture would also shift for Mexican Americans who were increasingly grouped with other people of mixed Hispanic descent such as Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans, to become Latino—the nation’s largest ethnic minority. Many of the objects displayed here portray the struggles, aspirations, and sensibilities of Mexican American men and women in the 20th century. Take special note of the objects on view below—the Cesar Chavez poster, the short-handled hoe, the print titled "Work and Rest", and the paños titled "Valor" and "La Tierra Nueva en Aztlán."

Cultural ExpressionsThe cultural expressions of Mexican Americans and their ancestors are as diverse as the regions and times that have shaped their histories. The popular arts produced within Mexican America, from saddles to santos and the theater of protest, all emerge from the rich but contested exchange of cultures between European and Native peoples, Catholic and Protestant, old immigrant and new. Traditions like the Hispanic art of New Mexico go back to the earliest days of the colonization of the upper valleys of the Rio Grande.

Other emblems of Mexican American culture are much younger, gaining currency in the increasingly urban youth culture of the World War II era. This generation of Mexican Americans was pivotal in the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Its songs, attitudes, and organizing strategies laid the spiritual and political foundation for the dissident Chicano movement that materialized in the late 1960s. It was a period in which Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales’s epic poem "Yo Soy Joaquín" was made into an experimental film, Carlos Santana fused his psychedelic blues guitar with Afro-Cuban percussion, and Cesar Estrada Chavez and Dolores Huerta led Filipino and Mexican American farm workers on a five-year strike. The objects on view below demonstrate the range of cultural expressions within Mexican America—a Spanish Colonial Revival chair, Selena’s leather outfit, and images titled "Orale ese Vato" and "Mexican Boy."

The Spaniards who invaded Mexico brought to North America a well-developed equestrian tradition. Over the centuries, horses, saddles, and other riding paraphernalia were altered by the landscape and the lifestyles of both Spanish and indigenous riders. Accompanied by mariachi music, la charrería is the elaborate and spectacle-driven tradition of horsemanship in Mexico. As a national sport rooted in the everyday demands of ranching, the crafts and techniques of charrería were adopted and modified by American settlers in the 19th century. They in turn developed their own rodeo tradition. This elaborate saddle with embossed silver medallions was given to General Philip Sheridan by a Mexican friend in 1866. In that year, General Sheridan armed Mexican nationalists led by Benito Juárez, and headed a 50,000-man army along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to pressure France to end its occupation of Mexico.